Sunday, May 15, 2011

Harif launches Mezuzah campaign

As Palestinians and their supporters mark 63 years since their Nakba, one small organisation in London is fighting back. Tonight, Sunday 15 May, at a conference entitled The Jewish Nakba: remembering Jewish refugees from Arab Countries,Harif will launch its Mezuzah campaign and associated posters and leaflets (above).

The Mezuzah is the perfect symbol of the lost or stolen Jewish home in Arab countries. Harif has conceived of a plastic give-away version, containing a fact-filled scroll, which can be distributed wherever pro-Palestinian demonstrators are waving their 'keys', demanding their 'right of return' to their homes in what is now Israel.

Harif is holding the conference to tell the world that the largest single group of refugees arising from the Arab-Israeli conflict was in fact Jewish. Although Jewish refugees were soon absorbed in Israel and the West, Arab states have never recognised their responsibility for some 800,000 Jewish refugees. Neither have they offered compensation for Jewish suffering and losses.

The conference will hear testimonies from individual Jewish refugees, and a person who helped in their rescue will be presented with a special award by Tom Gross, the Middle East commentator.

For conference details email info@harif.org. For an A5 version of the poster above please email bataween@gmail.com.

6 comments:

Anonymous
said...

many refugees were created in the twenthieth century but no other group got a UN group for themselves. There are no UN groups for Mizrahi Jews, ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe, Bulgarians from Turkey or turks from Bulgaria.

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In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)